The Urajiro Oak of Morimasa Shrine

Urajiro means white-backed, and the name is a fair description. Turn a leaf of this oak over and the underside is a waxy silver-white, so a breeze through the crown changes the colour of the tree. Quercus salicina is one of Japan's evergreen oaks, a tree of warm hillsides that holds its leaves through winter and lets them go in spring as the new set pushes through. This one stands in the precinct of Morimasa, a small shrine in Kamitakeni, and was measured at 3.5 metres round in the national giant-tree survey of 2000, its health recorded then as partial dieback. That survey is the only source that describes the tree itself. The shrine is confirmed twice over, by a shrine directory and by the national corporate registry, but the oak is on one list and one list only, which is why this entry is flagged and why anyone who goes ought to tell us what they find. A second registered giant, a Japanese fir, stands behind the same shrine, so the stop is two trees in one small precinct. No source pins either trunk: the geocode landed on the district rather than the shrine, and the pin says so.